Users in networked, mobile computing environments may wish to make documents or other electronic content accessible to other users in certain locations. For example, a lecturer giving a presentation at a meeting, class, conference, or trade show may wish to share documents such as presentation slides and materials, product brochures, and/or the lecturer's contact information with attendees during the presentation.
Despite advances in mobile technology, mobile computing devices (i.e., ‘mobile devices’) such as smartphones and tablet devices typically have greater limitations on display size, networkability and memory, data storage, and central processing unit (CPU) capacities than desktop and server computers. While the relatively small size of mobile devices aids in portability and collaboration with other users, the relative lack of storage capacity on some mobile devices can be a hindrance for users who need to share electronic assets such as files, documents, and multimedia content. For example, some mobile devices lack sufficient storage space to locally store electronic assets to be shared with other devices. Given the versatility of mobile devices, it is desired to implement a means by which these devices can quickly share and access electronic content in the context of potentially intermittent, unreliable, occasionally-connected, variable speed (quality of service), or temporarily-unavailable networking capabilities.
Traditional document sharing techniques require multiple, manual steps. Current solutions typically require a user to manually upload or transfer documents to a network-accessible storage device, such as cloud-based storage, via a network, such as the Internet, a wide area network (WAN), or a local area network (LAN). Such solutions often require the user to establish access rules and restrictions for the uploaded documents. Other users wishing to view the documents must subsequently access the storage device (i.e., by logging in to a server), select documents, and then download the selected documents to their respective computing devices.